Can't help but root for hero of 'Wild'

Wednesday

Sep 26, 2007 at 12:01 AMSep 26, 2007 at 9:13 PM

For his latest feature as a director, Sean Penn has chosen a story about youthful alienation that alternately irritates and engages. Based on Brookline native Jon Krakauer’s best-seller, which was inspired by a true story, “Into the Wild” is basically a road picture that follows the adventures of Christopher McCandless, a bright college boy who, upon graduation, decides to chuck the middle-class ambitions his parents have been pushing for a trip into the unknown.

Constance Gorfinkle

For his latest feature as a director, Sean Penn has chosen a story about youthful alienation that alternately irritates and engages. Based on Brookline native Jon Krakauer’s best-seller, which was inspired by a true story, “Into the Wild” is basically a road picture that follows the adventures of Christopher McCandless, a bright college boy who, upon graduation, decides to chuck the middle-class ambitions his parents have been pushing for a trip into the unknown.

For starters, he donates to charity the remaining $24,000 in his college fund that was supposed to go toward law school, and, without a word to his folks or his sister, Carine, whom he adores, gets in his old Datsun and heads west, on his way to Alaska.

Maybe you have to be 23 — McCandless’ age — to find this “search for freedom and truth” admirable, as though such entities can only be found kayaking down a wild river or trudging through snow drifts. And, for a while, you really are tempted to smack this indulged young man, who’s never had to support himself, and has only contempt for his parents (Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt). The impression is that this act of rebellion is primarily a way to punish them for what he perceives as their hypocrisy and for the misery they put him and his sister through with their brutal fights all during their childhoods.

Yes, that’s terrible, you think. But many children suffer such unhappiness without resorting to the ultimate torture for a parent. John also is amazingly naïve for a boy his age, a latter-day flower child (this is the mid-’90s, not the mid-’60s) who believes all answers exist in the wide-open spaces and that nirvana can only be experienced living by your wits.

But as the film progresses, McCandless begins to grow on you, through the sensitive portrayal given by Emile Hirsch. Small and boyish, his delicate facial features effectively conveying genuine innocence and hope, Hirsch seduces the most cynical of us into yearning for his triumph over the elements.

Beautifully directed by Penn, the movie follows the actual journey McCandless took after graduating from Emory University in Atlanta, first in his car which surrenders to a sudden flood in a dry river bed, across the western states, by thumb and freight car, all the while collecting memories — which he records diligently in a notebook — and friends, who range from a hippie couple (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker) to a lonely widowed war veteran (Hal Holbrook), from a tough grain elevator operator (Vince Vaughn) to a sweet singer of country songs (Kristen Stewart), whose advances he resists in a most gentlemanly fashion.

These vignettes of sociability are interspersed with brief scenes of McCandless’ previous life and the climactic event of his journey, the discovery of an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness, where he sets up housekeeping as he waits for the coming winter.

The movie takes no point of view regarding McCandless’ actions. On the one hand they seem monumentally selfish, but on the other, he is magnificently brave and touchingly romantic, as he seeks the person he so longs to be.

Haven’t we all, at one time or other, longed to step outside our assigned persona but haven’t for fear of falling too far to climb back?